Freight Train Derails in Minnesota; 9 Hurt

For the second time in 15 days, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train has derailed and crashed after apparently losing braking power. And once again, the FBI has been called in to investigate the possibility of sabotage.

Railroad sources in Kansas City, Kan., said that in both wrecks, investigators were focusing on the possibility that control levers on one or more cars had been moved into a position that could have crippled some of the brakes. Whether the levers had been moved deliberately was not immediately determined. The sources said the levers could have been moved by the impact of the crashes.

The latest crash occurred in an industrial area of St. Paul before midnight Wednesday, when an 89-car freight train derailed and plowed into three locomotives and a railroad office building, injuring nine men. Authorities estimated the damage at $1 million.

Dick Russack, a spokesman for the railroad, said that “there appears to have been some tampering” with the train. He said that the company had asked the FBI to investigate possible sabotage. Russack declined to provide details.

The crash is the third recent railroad derailment that has attracted FBI scrutiny.

On Oct. 9, someone pried loose a rail on a desolate stretch of Southern Pacific railroad track 65 miles southwest of Phoenix and sent Amtrak’s Sunset Limited passenger train plunging into a gully. A sleeping-car attendant was killed and 78 other people were injured.

On Feb. 1, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train crashed in the Cajon Pass near San Bernardino, killing two crew members. Investigators said there was a possibility that the brake system had been tampered with.

However, authorities cautioned that they have no evidence that the control-lever movements were deliberate, and not caused by the impact of the crashes. Colleen Crowley, an FBI spokeswoman in Minneapolis, said the investigations are still too preliminary to draw any conclusions as to whether the crashes were linked.

The train that derailed here had been assembled at a rail yard on the north side of Minneapolis. The 89 cars carried lumber, grain, ammonium nitrate--which can be explosive--and other cargo bound for Galesburg, Ill. The train, pulled by two locomotives, was inspected before it left the Northtown yard and nothing unusual was found.

The train made a routine stop, then continued its journey. Shortly before midnight, the brakes apparently failed on a downhill grade.

The train, traveling too fast for a curve, started to topple from the tracks. Both the locomotives and dozens of the cars derailed and smashed into other rail cars and locomotives in a Canadian Pacific railroad yard before slamming into the building on the Mississippi River flats about four miles southeast of downtown St. Paul.

One victim was pinned beneath a grain-carrier car for three hours in frigid temperatures before rescue workers chiseled him out of the frozen ground with a jackhammer. He later was taken to a hospital for treatment of hypothermia.

Fire officials said the cars were twisted in every direction, some landing upside-down and some on top of one another. The impact wrenched rails from their crossties and destroyed a steel pedestrian bridge over the yard.

“It’s just unbelievable the way the cars were thrown around; it’s just unbelievable that nobody was killed,” said John Hoffmann, deputy fire chief of St. Paul.

He said the wreckage was strewn across a quarter of a mile.

Cleanup was underway Thursday morning. One of the first jobs was siphoning up thousands of gallons of fuel that spilled from the locomotives’ ruptured tanks.

FBI agents and investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board began examining the wreckage early Thursday. The results from the federal investigation are not expected for months.

An NTSB spokesman said that the agency would have no comment on the investigation.

Rick Ellis, a Burlington Northern superintendent, declined to estimate how fast the train was going when it derailed, but St. Paul Fire Chief Tim Fuller said that it may have been between 40 and 50 mph.

Hillbery reported from St. Paul and Gorman from Kansas City. Times staff writers Eric Malnic in Los Angeles and Art Pine in Washington contributed to this story.